


The Fall of the Freedom Fighters

by Talyesin



Series: Aftermath on Finite Earths [16]
Category: DCU (Comics)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 06:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15455499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talyesin/pseuds/Talyesin





	The Fall of the Freedom Fighters

Earth X  
Mount Rushmore

 

"Sam?"

The party had been in full swing for a few hours. Uncle Sam looked around and saw the tall, dark, and handsome Black Condor standing behind him, frowning. 

"Rick!" Sam grinned at his longtime teammate. "Why so glum, chum?"

Rick, uncomfortable in his suit, had long ago lost his tie and unbuttoned the top three buttons of his shirt, revealing his bare, muscular chest. Frowning, he jerked a thumb over one shoulder. "It's Roy. He's had a few too many."

Uncle Sam looked past his teammate, and spotted the Human Bomb by the bar, trying to get Plastic Man to pull his finger, the oldest trick in the book. Sam chuckled to himself and told Rick, "I'll take care of him."

Sam strode the length of their subterranean headquarters to where Roy was taunting Pat. Though Plastic Man much preferred the nickname Plas (or sometimes, inexplicably, 'Eel'), Sam preferred thinking of his teammate by his given Christian name.

"C'mon, Plas, pull it," Roy was saying, his ungloved hand glowing with barely contained explosive power. One glowing finger was pointed at Plastic Man.

"No way, Jose," Pat said, arms held well away from his drunken tormentor - and in Plastic Man's case, 'well away' meant stretched almost fifteen feet behind him. "I was pulling that trick before Hitler goosestepped his way into Poland, pal o' mine."

"Well, now, that sure is a long time," Roy said, waving his glowing hand around. People nearby stepped away, in an amused but cautious circle. Some people laughed; everyone was grinning. The Human Bomb had gotten bombed.

"Watch where you're swinging that thing, there, Roy," Sam said, coming over and clapping Roy on the shoulder. The smell of good Kentucky sour mash came off Roy in waves so strong Sam could almost see them, like the stink-lines in the funny pages.

Happy stepped through the circle, brilliant and beaming. He laughed at the trio, going to the bar, signalling for the bartender. "Listen to Sam, Roy. Somebody might get hurt."

"Well now Happy ol' pal o' mine," Roy laughed, throwing one arm over Happy's shoulders, bringing the glowing hand up under his nose, wiggling his finger in a childish 'ah-ah-ah' gesture. "Sure wouldn't want that now, would we?"

Everyone was laughing at Happy when he died.

Roy's hand struck out, snake-fast, clapping down hard on Happy's brilliantly yellow tuxedo. Happy exploded in a shower of light. The laughter died just as suddenly as if someone had turned off a radio.

And then Sandra screamed.

"Roy, what in God's name...?" Sam managed to say, weakly, stunned as he - as the whole country - had been stunned when the forces at Pearl Harbor had fallen before Tojo's unprovoked assault.

"God's got nothing to do with it, Sam," Roy spat angrily, bitterly. He pulled his other glove off, both hands glowing with bright, killing power.

"I got him, Sam!" Plas yelled suddenly, stretching out his body, wrapping his torso and arms and legs around Roy, encircling him as tightly as a mummy.

"Plas, no!" Rick yelled, too late.

It was as if someone had put a grenade in a can of spaghetti. Caught by the explosion at ground zero, Plas was stretched well beyond his comfortable limit, long loose ropes of elastic body and limbs heading every which way, coating the party guests like thick red and yellow spider-web. Roy stood in the center of the red and yellow ropes, nearly naked, his suit torn to smoking shreds. Plastic Man's unconscious head, attached to a neck that had stretched nearly five hundred feet long, bounced six or seven times and landed at Sandra's feet. Sandra's screaming stopped, and she rushed at Roy, hands curled into claws, eyes blazing with hate and pain and rage. Midge and Darrell leapt up to grab her by the arms, still as strong as they would have been if they had been normal sized, but not strong enough to stop Sandra, who in her murderous rage at seeing her new husband killed before her own eyes, mad with the sudden instantaneous plummet from joy to grief, shook them off and charged right into the impeding form of Rick, much more massive than Sandra herself.

"Roy, why?" Sam asked, still stunned at the betrayal.

"Why? WHY?!" Roy shrieked, not drunk at all, sober as a judge, angry as hell. One hand brushed the bar and the long polished elmwood surface shattered into splinters. "I'll tell you why, you blind old arrogant fool! How long have we been here? Here on an Earth that isn't our own? How long did we fight those damned, stinking Axis? Sixty years! Sixty years we've been fighting the good fight! The Axis are gone now, and still, we're here on this damned planet! We all should have died years ago, died of old age, but no, no, we're here, still fighting, still damned to this hell you brought us to! Well I'm sick of it! Sick of being trapped here! Sick of these damned powers! Do you know how long it's been since I ate something without wondering if it would make it to my stomach? Do you know how long it's been since I-" here his eyes flickered toward Sandra, eyes streaming black mascara tears down her face, shrieking wordless pain and anger, held back from a suicide rush by Rick's strong arms "- since I... held a woman, touched a woman?"

"Roy-" Sam began, hands held palms out, trying to radiate a calm he didn't feel.

"No more words!" Roy screamed, just as Dan Richards, the Manhunter, swung a chair into Roy's back.

Two things happened then - the chair exploded into thousands of splinters, and the roof caved in.

Sam stared at the crumbling roof, and then felt his mind spiral toward madness. Two gargantuan hands were digging through the solid stone of the ceiling, a woman's hands, pulling away the ceiling. A face filled the hole: a glimpse of red hair and strong features, then figures dropped through the newly-created entrance, obscuring the woman's gigantic face, figures raining hot lead and beams of concentrated light and flames and killing ice into the assembled and terrified guests. Sam watched in dumb mute horror as his team was killed in front of his own eyes. Darrell and Midge crushed under a bare, gigantic foot. Rick and Sandra immolated in flames. Dan frozen to his core in a block of ice.

A bald man dressed in green and purple power armor flew through the hole in the ceiling, floating serenely down to sneer at the Spirit of America.

"You!" Sam spat. "I know you! Luthor!"

"Brilliant, Sam," Lex Luthor of Earth One smirked. "Can't pull the wool over your eyes."

"How-" Sam began, but was suddenly brought to his knees by a sudden crippling pain shooting through his chest. He clutched at his heart, and visions of America floated before his eyes. Washington, D.C. awash in a chemical sludge, spewed from the mouth of an inhuman titan. New York, New York, buried beneath a jungle of wild vegetation, his beloved Statue of Liberty toppled. Los Angeles a ruin of ash and nuclear flames. Riots in Chicago, the inhabitants tearing themselves to pieces in an insanity brought on by sheer, unadulterated terror. In the heartland - Kansas - a figure in blue and red blew fire from chalky white lips, burning the land and the cities and the people. Superman?, Sam thought, unable to believe what he was seeing.

All across the country, Americans were dying.

And not just the United States - more visions crowded Sam's mind. The animals in Africa rampaging through the cities. The newly rebuilt Eiffel Tower a molten slag. And in Germany...

A man in green and red, the hateful hated swastika plastered across his muscular chest, arrogant Aryan features laughing in triumph, laughing, laughing...

"He promised me he'd cure me," Roy said quietly behind Sam, bringing him back to the pain and destruction in the ruins of what had been Freedom Fighters headquarters. "You understand, don't you, Sam? I had to do it. I had to."

Sam turned, calm, so calm, deadly calm, and stared with icy blue eyes spilling tears down his wrinkled cheeks. "Benedict Arnold had nothing on you, Roy Lincoln."

"Kill him, Roy," Luthor laughed. "Kill him and be done with it."

In a split second, it became clear to Sam. His team was dead. His America was in ruins. His world was in peril.

Sam did the only thing he could do. He ran, slipping into the space between the worlds for the first time in over half a century.


End file.
